Edelman (1992: 173, 175):
How can a book on the matter of the mind pay so little attention to thinking, willing, and judging, or to feeling, emotion, and dreaming? Partly, this has to do with my original intentions, which were to describe the necessary bases for consciousness and meaning in a scientific fashion. I have attempted this in the faith that further and more sufficient psychological explorations can be launched once this description is substantiated. …
At a certain practical point, therefore, attempts to reduce psychology to neuroscience must fail. Given that the pursuit of thought as a skill depends on social and cultural interaction, convention, and logic, as well as on metaphor, purely biological methods as they presently exist are insufficient. In part, this is because thought at its highest levels is recursive and symbolic. Because we are each idiosyncratic sources of semantic interpretation, and because intersubjective communication is essential for thought (whether with a real or imaginary interlocutor), we must use and study these capacities in their own right.
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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, Edelman's scientific model of the mind is Galilean science, and so models the mind in terms of processes of its material-relational domain: a socially embedded, embodied brain. The complement of this model is a model of the mind in terms of processes of its mental-verbal domain, and the contents of consciousness — meanings and wordings — that mental and verbal processes project.
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